azazil.net

There seems to be a growing trend in the blogosphere for generating linkbacks, and since they all involve a free link for me, along with a flurry of traffic and perhaps some new subscribers, so I’m happy to join in :-) I reviewed John Chow back in February, and then reviewed Alex Shalman last month, and now for a new month here is new review of Jacin Steele’s blog. The rules stipulate that I include the following text:

Church of Jacin, a totally unreligious blog about personal growth and self help, is offering a link to your blog plus a chance at $50. All you have to do is post a review of Church of Jacin on your blog.

The first thing I noticed while looking around Jacin’s site is that there is no obvious way to browse his older articles. The posts are organised by category, and are tagged generously, but aside from the titles of the last 10 posts in one of the sidebars, the only way to find interesting old posts is to page through them, 3 articles at a time with the next button at the bottom of each page.

Having stopped here and there to read some of the posts that caught my eye, there is a spiritual, new-agey feel to much of what is written, with a lot of the material inspired by James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, a book that I like, and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which I think contains some dangerous ideas (more about that in another post).

Jacin himself seems comes from a similar background to me, having been raised a Christian, but as I matured in my thinking, finding Christianity to be mostly irrelevant to life in the 20th Century West. The Self Help and Personal Growth keywords he uses to describe his niche are not at all in the practical day-to-day tips style of sites like Life Hacker, Martial Development or even Personal Development Ideas, but more along the lines of World Wide Enlightenment and Steve Pavlina.

Regardless of my point of view, Church of Jacin is a thought provoking site, and after a bit of hunting I found the RSS feed, minus the standard icon, near the top on the left. Jacin, you may want to make it more prominent to attract more subscribers…